I’ve recently been trying out a Kobo. Amazon has some issues and Kindles are hard to do any amount of customization to, let’s just leave it at that.

So what fun tricks can one do with a Kobo?

Well, for one, it’s a Linux system. And if you attach it to your computer, you get access to a lot of the local filesystem. This includes the SQLite database holding all of teh system metadata, along with places to install all sorts of interesting scripts.

One that I’ve been wanting in particular is the ability to extract my annotations. It’s a great way to review books. Highlight, write a note, and then export right at the end.

So how do you do that on a Kobo?

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UPDATE 2025-06-05: And… I give up: Plan B

I’ve been on a home automation kick for the last little while, so what better time than to dust off an old project and put up a home / family dashboard in the kitchen/dining room!

Previously, I had this running off a FireTV and MagicMirror. This worked well enough… but oh man is the FireTV browser terrible. Plus I had to do some crazy things to get it to stay on and never could get it to launch right back into the display on a power outage. So now we have version 2!

In the end, I ended up with:

• An Orange Pi Zero 2W for the brains
• Armbian for the operating system
• Chromium as the browser (I did try Firefox first…)
• Home Assistant for the data, remote control, and UI
  • WallPanel to hide the side/top bar
  • Browser Mod for remote control

Not too bad.

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